And in the end we lie awake
by WaltzMatildah
Summary: In the wake of the season six finale, Izzie finds out what has happened to Alex at Seattle Grace during the day. This also features Lexie.


Lyrics from "Out of My Hands" by Dave Matthews Band. Title from "Death and all his Friends" by Coldplay.

**And in the end we lie awake...**

**By Waltzmatildah**

ooo

_Out on my window ledge_  
_I don't feel safe_  
_And I stay_  
_Looking down on you_

_It's out of my hands for now_

ooo

She hears about it on the radio. It's the lead item on the three o'clock bulletin.

The first sentence of the newscast is crystal clear. Like no other sound exists beyond the announcer's gravelly staccato and the slightly static hum of her car speakers. A vaccuum of sorts.

After that it all gets a little hazy. Every second word drops out. Her vision smudges to blue and pink at the edges.

She tears through a stop sign without a second glance. Horns scream. Brakes squeal. Hers. Front tyres mount the chipped curb at the shoulder of the road as she slams to a halt. Chin rebounding off steering wheel. A glancing blow.

She thinks her heart stops beating. If only for a second or two. It might be a minute.

It feels like an age.

She wrenches the door open and dry heaves, her elbows leave muddy dents in the soft grass.

* * *

She drives with all the windows rolled down and still has to pull over every seventeen minutes to breathe.

* * *

She remembers leaving. Remembers it vividly. The colours and the smells and the bitter taste of his goodbye on her lips.

She forgets the sound of his laugh. It was rare. Though that she does know.

Fingers rake through strands of matted blonde. Over and over and over and over... Miles tick by, the gas guage points ever closer to empty. Mocking and obstinant.

Freezing sleet stings lips that are long since numb.

She'll drive all night if she has to.

* * *

Her cell phone is flipped open on the passenger seat. No one is answering.

She's not expecting them to.

* * *

She fiddles constanty with the radio dial. Switches from one station to the next, obsessively searching for more information.

For confirmation of what she already knows. If she's honest with herself, she does already know.

And she is honest these days. It's the one last thing he gave her and she's held onto it with both hands, breathed it in deep.

_"...can confirm that at there are at least seven casualties, though that figure is expected to rise as the afternoon goes on..."_

She jabs a finger roughly at the dial. Channel surfs the freeway in a direction she never thought she'd head.

_"... critically injured have been evacuated to Seattle Presbyterian Hospital..."_

At least, not like this.

* * *

She stops at a gas station three miles from the hospital. The oily teenager behind the counter regards her with a curious sideways glare. The muted television behind his head streams reel after reel of horror and carnage.

She watches without blinking for eight minutes. A twenty dollar bill clenched in her fist. Long forgotten money for gas she never manages to pump.

A gurney flies across the asphalt. Mark Sloan and Lexie Grey flank its sides. The camera work is unsteady, loses them momentarily as a police cordon shoves the operator back behind orange crime scene tape.

It's like a hollywood blockbuster.

Until it's not.

* * *

She screams.

Down on her knees. In the dust and the faded footprints of strangers.

* * *

In the fog and flow of televised information she turns and heads back two blocks. Abandons her car in the lot at the gas station as her twenty dollar bill skids and dances in the breeze. The sun is setting, it's all coming to a close.

The finality in that is terrifying as she stumbles, staggers her way over cracked sidewalk. She catches her reflection in a store window, stops to stare back into her own eyes, runs a tacky finger down the glass, splitting herself in two.

Before and after. And after that.

* * *

The hospital is unfamiliar, corridors and exits and endless sets of stairs.

* * *

She pushes through heavy swinging doors. Nobody stops her.

* * *

She doesn't want to touch him. Knows with grim defiance that if she does she'll never let go. She doesn't need to touch, she just needs to see.

To see for herself.

Then she can go again. After that, she can go.

* * *

There's a figure in front of her. Achingly familiar as her whole body rocks to the thud of her pounding heart. The figure simply stands there, a faded silhouette at twenty paces.

"Mere?"

She's tentative, the word barely registers; whisper soft and cautious. Her feet are heavy, blood pulses noisily through her veins in a slow motion wave. They meet, clinging together, somewhere in the middle, not quite half way, re-join in folds that are molded and safe as they sink, fluid-like, to the cool tile beneath their feet.

* * *

They're pulled apart. Forcefully. It's all she can do not to blindly swing her fists. Meredith's fingers are twisted in the soft cotton of her shirt and she's sobbing.

Sobbing.

She gets it then. The enormity of what has happened. Of what she has been spared. Cancer and divorce and bus drivers who failed to see, to stop, to see and stop in time. All of it latching together in a way that means she has been spared this.

She gets it then.

* * *

Amid a cacophony of chaos and unbridled fear she finds his room.

The part of her that had been convinced she was on the wrong floor, that he didn't need a room, that she was too late, dissolves into and onto itself. She's to the bone cold. Shivering with an intensity that chatters her teeth and numbs her toes.

From the doorway she can see that he's not alone.

He's alive, there are machines seeing to that.

And he's not alone.

* * *

Their fingers are twisted tightly together, even in sleep. Lexie's jump with a regularity that tells her she's far from relaxed.

There's blood in her almost unrecognisably blonde hair and a salt track of tears to her chin.

* * *

She makes a noise. She doesn't mean to.

Lexie startles awake, eyes terror-wide and unseeing as she launches her upper body across and over Alex, the mistaken, horrifying, desperate belief that he still needs protecting.

The motion, it is instinct. She can barely bring herself to imagine the unholy hell that brought it to existence.

She raises her hands, palms out. Surrendering.

It feels like she's giving up so much more than that.

* * *

"Lexie, Lexie, Lexie..."

She's whispering.

"It's okay, it's okay, it's okay..."

It's not. It's not even close. Lexie sinks then, collapses onto Alex with one hand clawing at his covers, the other pushed into her mouth. Muting the wailing screams that she's trying, failing to hide.

She's seen hysteria before. But this is raw. Open and bleeding. A tightrope of what is and what could have been. Lexie is staring at her, blank eyes and bellowing lungs and only a heartbeat away from a melt down.

She should know.

* * *

She wraps her own fingers around Lexie's wrist. Pulls her fingers from her mouth before she can choke on them completely. In a bear hug she pulls while Lexie struggles half-heartedly, too tired to put up a decent fight. A blanket comes with them and as her back meets the wall behind her she slides them to the floor, Lexie between her knees, trembling and defiant and so much like the sister that never wanted her.

Until she did.

* * *

She'd offer Lexie her bathroom floor if she thought it would help but she knows from personal experience that it only offers a temporary reprieve.

* * *

Lexie falls asleep wrapped in her arms. Her ex-husband's new girlfriend. She'd laugh but the notion is not as instinctive as it used to be and her muscles ache with a tiredness that threatens to overwhelm her.

* * *

Through conversations she can hear out in the hall, muted and dull but echoing in her ears nonetheless, she learns about it all. About the horror. And the carnage. And the heroes who pulled together in the face of the unspeakable.

They found him in an elevator. Mark Sloan's voice reverberates low and ragged, i"I thought he was dead."/i

They inserted a chest tube while he was conscious and screaming. Bleeding to death on a conference room table.

She closes her eyes, burries them in Lexie's hair as she sleeps, and cries silently.

Reed Adamson is dead. Executed. They've put the pieces together, they think Alex watched it happen.

Cristina saved Derek's life. The cardio goddess that no one questioned she probably already was.

Owen Hunt was injured. He's already been released.

Charles Percy died with his head in Dr. Bailey's lap. The image of that so much sadder for the delivery. Even through the walls she can hear the tears in her voice as she recounts her tale to the gathering audience.

* * *

She bought him coffee once. Dropped it as his feet instead.

She'd give anything to take that back.

* * *

Alex stirs. He's not awake but he's close.

The almost imperceptible change in his heart rate has Lexie jerking awake and reaching for him before she can register where she is and what is going on.

Lexie, with her hands on his face, in his hair, adjusting sheets and tubes, with her hands twisting in his, turns. Opens her mouth to speak.

She raises a hand, surrendering once again with a slow shake of her head.

"It's okay. I'll go."

Lexie nods dumbly. Her thumb tracing unconscious circles around the base of his.

"Call me though? Please?"

Her voice breaks on the please. It's pleading, desperate.

Sad.

"Please let me know he's okay."

Lexie's image shimmers as she backs out of the room. Blends as one with Alex behind a blurring film of tears.

"Please let me know he's okay..."

* * *

She makes it three steps outside his room before reaching for the wall. Sliding until her chin is on her knees.

Conversations around her slam to a sudden stop. Her own sobs are all that break the still silence. They're shocked she's there, they were not expecting her to come. No one was expecting her to come.

But for the life of her, she can't being to imagine how she's ever going to leave.

_Looking down from here_  
_It's outta my hands for now_  
_Out on my window ledge_  
_It's outta my hands for now_  
_So let me in_  
_Let me in_


End file.
